Once again the Tories are hiding their own culpability behind vapid 'culture war' nonsense

Boris Johnson's Tory government have opened up a new front in their nauseating culture war, by trying to blame the term "white privilege" for catastrophic failings in the educations system, that leave working class kids (white and non-white alike) at huge disadvantages in comparison to kids from wealthier backgrounds.

I'm going to give a non-exhaustive list of other factors that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than this term, but first I'll briefly explain what "white privilege" actually means.

The term certainly doesn't mean that all white people are wealthy and privileged, only a fool or someone who is trying to fool you would try to argue that.

It means that in a still-racist society there are advantages to being white.

White people are obviously less likely to suffer institutional racism like being harassed by the police or denied painkillers when seriously ill; we're less likely to have our CVs immediately thrown in the bin for having non-white sounding names; and we don't have to face disgusting examples of inter-personal racism like the majority of non-white people have experienced in their lifetimes.

This obviously doesn't mean that life is a bed of roses for all white people, because there are all kinds of other forms of discrimination such as classism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of anti-queer bigotry, ageism, persecution of the disabled, persecution of the neurodiverse ...

Only those with malicious intentions would even try to portray recognising that whiteness is an advantage in a racist society as some kind of attack on poor white people, which brings us to the Tory government, and their woeful efforts to hide their own catastrophic failings behind yet more culture war bollocks.

So here are eleven things that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than the existence of the term "white privilege".

1. Education cuts

Ever since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010, the Tories have been inflicting brutal cuts on England's education budget, with the worst cuts of all concentrated in the poorest areas of the country. This means that working class kids have borne the brunt of this deliberate Tory strategy of under-funding the education system, and trashing the nation's future economic potential.

How dare they pretend to give a damn about the prospects of working class kids, when their own longstanding policy is to systematically underfund the schools these working class kids attend?

2. Tuition fees

When the Tories and Lib-Dems colluded to triple university tuition fees, and bring in rip-off new repayment terms (inflation +3%) they ensured that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds would need to drive themselves tens of thousands of pounds into debt just to get their degrees, and that the vast majority of post-2012 graduates (83%) would never be able to pay these debts off despite making entire working lifetimes of repayments.

Is it even possible to think of a better way of putting working class kids off academic attainment, than telling them they'll have to suffer an entire lifetime of unpayable debt if they aspire to go to university?

3. Youth service cuts

Anyone who claims to give the slightest damn about kids in deprived working class communities should be championing youth services aimed at honing kids' talents, giving them social skills, and keeping them away from crime and drugs.

The Tory government has been relentlessly slashing youth services budgets to the bone (70% cut in less than a decade).

4. Sure Start

If you want to give kids the best possible opportunities in life, it's crucial to begin the positive impact as soon as possible, which is why, despite their many other faults, the 1997-2010 Labour government did a great job in setting up Sure Start.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that Sure Start is extremely beneficial to kids' prospects, the Tories have slashed it to pieces since 2010, resulting in 500+ closures, and once again, the worst cuts have been reserved for the most disadvantaged areas.

5. Free School meals

Anyone who claims to care about the prospects of working class kids wouldn't hesitate for a second over providing free school meals during a global pandemic, because there's mountains of evidence that well-fed kids concentrate better and get better grades, while starving hungry and malnourished kids often fail to live up to their academic potential.

But we've all seen how the Tory government repeatedly voted against providing free school meals during the coronavirus pandemic, and had to be shamed into action by the footballer Marcus Rashford, on more than one occasion.

6. Social security cuts

Since 2010 the Tory government has implemented round after round of savage social security cuts. It hardly takes a genius to understand that policies like slashing working tax credits and cutting entitlement to child tax credits and child benefit would end up having profoundly negative consequences for children in the poorest families.

But there's just something in the Tory mentality that gives them a perverse sense of pleasure at the idea of punishing the poor for their poverty, and ensuring that their kids grow up even poorer too.

7. Adult education cuts

Since 2010 the Tories have relentlessly attacked adult education spending, even though any sane government would be investing in adult education in order to ensure that the economy has a skilled and flexible workforce, and so that workers have the means and ability to retrain should they lose their jobs.

The Tories clearly don't want a modern, flexible, highly-skilled workforce, they want to minimise retraining opportunities, and ensure working class people who lose their jobs end up languishing in exploitative low-pay gig economy jobs, working for capitalist mega-corporations, because their retraining options are so severely limited.

And to make things even worse, despite all of his cheery rhetoric about investment and upskilling, Johnson's government is pressing ahead with yet another round of cuts to adult education spending.

8. Wage repression

After the Tories came to power in 2010 they imposed the longest sustained period of wage repression since records began. 

There's basically no better strategy to erode the prospects of working class kids, than to spend the best part of a decade systematically eroding the real value of their parents' wages, and ensuring that when these kids do eventually enter the workforce, they'll be earning less in real terms than those who were entering the workforce a decade previously!

9. School privatisation

Since 2010 the Tories have been overseeing an extraordinary programme of school privatisation in England, to such an extent that 75% of English secondary schools are now controlled by private profiteering pseudo-charities called "Academy Chains" (many of them owned and operated by major Tory party donors).

These profiteers aren't allowed to leech profits out of the education system in shareholder dividends because of their so-called charitable status, but there are loads of other ways of soaking cash out of our kids' education budgets into private pockets, not least vastly inflated six figure salaries for profiteering academy chain directors and their cronies, and endless tides of massive untendered supply contracts handed out to their friends and family.

If you think that the existence of the term "white privilege" has more to do with working class academic under-achievement than this widespread looting of education budgets by Tory party donors and assorted other spivs and profiteers, there's something seriously wrong with the way you're looking at the world.

10. Soaring child poverty

Several of the aforementioned issues, like social security cuts and Tory wage repression have combined to drive half a million more kids into poverty over the last five years, with a shocking 75% of all the kids in poverty, now living in a household where at least one adult works.

It's utterly obscene for the Tories to pretend that they give a damn about working class kids, when their own policies have resulted in hundreds of thousands more kids growing up in dire poverty, and literally millions of kids learning the very early life lesson that 'work doesn't pay', because they see their parents struggling in destitution, despite having jobs.

11. Classism

Britain has one of the most rigid and persistent class hierarchies in the world. The wealthy privately-educated 7% minority are vastly over-represented in politics, corporate media, the judiciary, corporate boardrooms, and the top-paying public service jobs.

Two of our last three Prime Ministers went to the exact same elitist private school, which charges vastly more than the average annual salary in yearly fees.

People still use ludicrous anachronistic terms like lord, baroness, and sir in all seriousness, and we've still got unelected hereditary peers in the House of Lords for pity's sake.

The evidence shows that people from working class backgrounds, with regional accents, are routinely paid thousands of pounds per year less than the posh, for doing exactly the same work.

And the current Prime Minister is a hateful elitist, who used incredibly derogatory language to attack working class children as "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive, and illegitimate" in a disgusting tirade in which he also derided working class men as "drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless".

Is it any wonder at all that society is geared to fail working class kids, when we insist on picking sneering elitists like Johnson to run the show?

Conclusion

If you look at their actual track record in government, it's obvious that the Tories have been conducting class warfare against the working class. 

They've slashed education budgets, handed control of schools to a bunch of sleazy profiteers, gutted youth services, ruined sure start, smashed the adult education system to pieces, and imposed rip-off unpayable student debts.

Beyond their outright vandalism of the social ladder, to make it so much harder for working class kids to escape poverty, they've also been actively making the poverty worse with their twin agenda of wage repression and social security cuts.

And these Tory vermin think that they can just hide this dreadful and downright malicious track record behind a smokescreen of vapid and divisive culture war bollocks about the term "white privilege".

The reason they think they can get away with pushing this absolute gibberish is that they're confident that the majority of the lower orders (as they see us) have been leaving the education system with such under-developed critical thinking skills, that we won't even notice that we're being duped into blaming "woke teachers" or whatever, rather than the powerful elitists who actually run the country, and are obviously to blame.

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Why genuine 'centrists' should be backing the left

For the last nine years Britain has been charging headlong to the far-right, with one increasingly militant Tory government after another.

In 2010 the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power for the first time in 13 years, and the results were disastrous. The Lib-Dems voted through every single piece of wanton Tory ideological malice, including the austerity fanaticism that trashed our living standards and laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash to happen.

The Lib-Dems love to pretend that they were some kind of wonderful moderating force, but the truth is easy to find. If we look at the absolute worst stuff the austerity coalition did, Lib-Dem fingerprints are all over all of it: Austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, disability persecution, NHS privatisation, catastrophic local government cuts, Bedroom Tax, 75% of secondary schools in England privatised, Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment ...

And to make matters even worse leading Lib-Dems actually took personal responsibility for delivering the absolute worst of it, the most egregious examples being Vince Cable's outrageous decision to flog off our Royal Mail at miles below its true value to a bunch of city spivs, and Jo Swinson doing nothing whatever to stop the imposition of unlawful tribunal fees, despite being Employment Minister in the austerity coalition!

Things did get even worse after the Lib-Dem collapse in 2015 as the unrestrained Tories intensified the already unprecedented rate of privatisations, and imposed the most brutal social security cuts in the history of the welfare state, but it's beyond obvious that things could never have even got to that stage without the deliberate calculated collusion of the Lib-Dems.

Then in 2016 the Tories gambled away the nation's future on a ludicrous Brexit referendum in which the Leave option was left entirely undefined, allowing Brexiteers to cynically promise voters the moon on a stick, with absolutely no intention of following through on their false promises.

The day after his gamble backfired Cameron was gone, replaced by the fanatically right-wing wannabe tyrant Theresa May, who had all the hard-right politics, inflexible stubbornness, control-freakery, and authoritarianism of an all-powerful autocrat, but thankfully not the competence, or self-awareness, or discipline to actually follow through on her outrageous threats, or actually 'crush the saboteurs'.

May did manage to inflict even more ideological damage during her two year reign, not least her decision to starve the NHS of new recruits by wantonly scrapping NHS bursaries, creating a ticking time bomb of a recruitment crisis that will destroy the NHS if it is not resolved soon.

And now we have Boris Johnson, who is so wilfully intent on pandering to the far-right ultranationalist demographic that stalwarts of Conservatism who backed all of the austerity fanaticism, and wage repression, and welfare vadalism, and disability persecution, and public service cuts, and infrastructure under-investment are now fleeing the party in droves in absolute disgust at what it's becoming, including Johnson's own brother Jo.

It's mind-bogglingly obvious that the UK needs to rapidly abandon this race to the extreme-right fringe and reset back towards the centre ground. It's equally obvious that it's literally impossible to move away from the territory of the hard-right without moving somewhat to the left.

Thus there are actually two kinds of 'centrists'. One type who recognise the obvious truth that the UK needs to move significantly leftwards in order to gravitate back towards the traditional centre ground, and another smug, complacent, orthodox neoliberal bunch who just want to pause where we are with a "more of the same" agenda, enjoy the trappings of power for a few years, and then hand deliver power back to the next hard-right government that comes along.

The problem of course is that there's no commonly understood distinction between these two different kinds of 'centrism'.

There are those 'centrists' who believe in the mixed economy of socially owned infrastructure and services, and privately owned but well-regulated businesses, who believe Britain has gone way too far to the right.

And there are those 'faux centrists' who believe in always standing just a couple of milimetres to the left of the Tory party, no matter how far off to the crackpot far-right extreme they've gone, and never shifting an inch back towards where the traditional centre actually used to be.

Unfortunately an awful lot of the second kind of 'centrist' have made their home in the Liberal Democrats, hoping to turn it into a Conservatives MkII party to hold firm on the hard-right political territory, to keep the crushing living standards-destroying austerity coming, to keep the tax dodge loopholes open for the benefit of their mega-rich backers, and to keep annihilating the wages and working conditions of ordinary working people under the utterly misguided delusion that the best way to make the rich richer, is to force the poor and ordinary into destitution.

I'm as guilty as anyone for vehemently condemning this kind right-wing faux 'centrism', and maybe genuine 'centrists' who do actually recognise the need for a dramatic leftward turn back towards the centre ground might have felt caught in the crossfire as the left have repeatedly slammed the faux 'centrists' for their ludicrous pretence that their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising, infrastructure under-investing, hard-right fanaticism is anywhere near the legitimate political centre.

I'm sorry if this is the case, and people who just wants things to return to normality feels caught in the crossfire.

It's just that a bunch of right-wing neoliberal militants intent on creating a veneer of legitimacy for their radical hard-right agenda by pretending that it's some kind of moderate, mainstream, centrist philosophy have stolen the positioning of legitimate 'centrists', who do actually recognise the need to rebalance somewhat towards the left.

Any legitimate 'centrist' really has to understand that millions of people in Britain literally can't afford yet more years of "more of the same" neoliberal orthodoxy shamelessly disguised as 'centrism'.

We need fundamental change to undo some of the worst hard-right excesses of the last decade; investment instead of austerity, a well earned wage rise for British workers, restoration of the wantonly vandalised social safety net, de-privatisation of police, hospitals, schools, and prisons, and de-centralisation of political power ...

Legitimate 'centrists' should be saying "no bloody way" to Jo Swinson and the Lib-Dems' transparent efforts to restructure their party as Conservatives 2.0 disguised as 'centrism' to dupe the gullible, and "yes please" to Labour's strategy of actually investing in Britain's future, and undoing as much of the hard-right Tory damage as they can.

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This misty-eyed Remainer revisionism needs to stop

One of the most irritating tropes that keeps doing the rounds in the Remainer echo chambers is that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of glorious good-natured utopia until 17.4 million Leave voters decided to fuck everything up on purpose for no good reason.

Aside from all the stuff I've detailed in the header image, just consider these facts:

• Tory wage repression policies resulted in the longest sustained collapse in the value of UK workers wages since records began.

• Economically illiterate "let's cut our way to growth" Tory austerity fanaticism resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in Centuries.

• Tory austerity fanaticism also resulted in the closure of literally thousands of public facilities and services (hospitals, police & fire stations, Sure Start centres, libraries and other local government services ...) and left the remaining services massively over-stretched, under-funded, and under-staffed. 

• Between 2010 and 2016 the two main areas of growth in Britain were in exploitative and unstable Zero Hours Contracts, and in people reduced to such poverty that they were left reliant on food bank charitable handouts.

All of this stuff was happening before the EU referendum in 2016, and the self-serving silence of the Tories and centrists during the EU referendum (because they didn't want to implicate themselves for supporting all of these ruinous policies) left the door wide open for the Brexiteers to cynically blame all of it (collapsing wages, crumbling public services, widespread poverty, shitty low-paid jobs ...) on immigrants and the EU.

Of course a lot of smug "centrists" were having a whale of a time between 2010 and 2016, entirely unconcerned by the ravages of austerity, social security vandalism, and wage repression because the horrifying consequences weren't falling on them ... but millions of us were fully aware that Britain wasn't the "moderate", "good-natured", "fundamentally calm country" of "good practical judgement" that exists in this absurd centrist delusion.

The most damaging thing about this bone-headed centrist delusion that because everything was fine and dandy for them pre-2016, it was fine and dandy for everyone else too, is the fact that this stance is so damned counter-productive.

If Remainers really wanted to convince Leave voters to switch allegiances in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much effort in demanding, hitting the people you need to convince with this "everything was fucking marvellous before you stupid fuckers fucked it all up for no reason at all" attitude is about as counter-productive as you could imagine.

A practical approach to undoing this Brexit farce would be to try to understand the underlying causes of the Brexit vote, and to point out that most of the crap people were suffering in the neglected, de-industrialised, and left-behind communities that voted for Brexit was due to decades of hard-right neoliberal economic policies, ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, and malicious public service vandalism ... not immigrants and the EU.

There's no way you change the minds of the appalling far-right ultranationalist Blue-Kippers in the Home Counties and the Shires because they'll always be financially insulated from the worst of the Brexit chaos, but it is at least possible to reach out to people in left-behind communities and explain that their suffering was caused by malicious domestic government policies like deindustrialisation, austerity, welfare vandalism, infrastructure under-investment, and severe public service cuts, not by membership of the EU.

But the smug centrist approach is to tell people in these communities that everything was always quite simply marvellous, and that they should have been perfectly happy with the pathetic crumbs that they were getting in a system that was working absolutely fine for the well-to-do, rather than deciding to fuck everything up for no reason at all.

The worst impact of Tory austerity fanaticism a lot of these smug centrist Remainers will have felt is having their bin collections reduced from weekly to fortnightly, so it's no wonder they're absolutely incapable of empathising with the pain, and misery, and hopelessness, and stress of the poor and vulnerable people who suffered under the jackboot of it.

So they sneer at them: How dare working class Leave voters fuck everything up for us for no good reason? How dare you all be so stupid and irresponsible? How dare you not listen to us when we've told you what's best for you? How dare you ruin our beloved delusions that Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia? How dare Jeremy Corbyn go to a laughable shit hole like Morecambe rather than pandering to us?

And somehow these people imagine that they'd actually be able to win another EU referendum by campaigning like this!

Remainers tend to absolutely hate it when their opponents portray them as smug, out-of-touch metropolitan elitists who are only concerned with their own comfort.

But when extremely high-profile Remainers resort to this sickening rose-tinted glorification of past circumstances that were indisputably nightmarish for millions of us, and thousands of other Remainers retweet this counter-productive nonsense all over the Internet, how else do they expect to be perceived?

The terrifying thing is that having intolerably smug and strategically inept people like this push themselves to the forefront of the anti-Brexit movement means that it's almost certainly doomed to fail, and their failure will mean that the austerity-victims that they quite clearly didn't give a shit about during their imagined pre-2016 utopia will be the ones to bear the brunt of it all over again.

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Good news workers, you're poorer than you were 8 years ago!

Somehow millions of people still believe the ludicrous fairy story that the Tories are the party of economic competence despite the overwhelming evidence that they're nothing of the sort.

Take this Tweet from Dominic Raab. It clearly shows that UK workers' wages have collapsed in real terms, and that they're only just crawling back towards the level they were at when the Tories came to power in 2010.

The huge dip we can see in the graph that happened between 2010 and 2014 was the longest sustained collapse in workers' wages since records began, and it all came from the economically illiterate Tory assumption that the poorer the workers, the richer the bosses, and the richer the bosses the richer the nation.

This assumption is obvious bollocks because if workers' wages collapse they have less disposable income, and if they have less disposable income the economy flat lines because of the lack of demand (this stuff is so obvious it should barely need stating).

 As a result of this sustained ideologically driven Tory assault on our wages and living standards, British workers are getting one of the worst deals in Europe. The only country where workers have had it worse over the last 10 years is crisis-stricken Greece, while workers in other basket-case economies like Italy, Spain, and Serbia are the only other ones to have endure an entire decade of negative wage growth like the Brits have.

Just look at France, where the gilets jaunes protesters are boiling with rage over falling living standards. In reality they've had a 6% increase in workers wages over the last decade in comparison to the 5% collapse the Tories have inflicted on British workers!

Not only are Brits not out on the streets protesting against conditions that are far worse than in France, they've actually twice re-elected the Tories who did this to them!

The extraordinary subservience of the Brits still isn't even the most incredible thing about this.

Just look at what Dominic Raab has written about the graph he shared.

Not only has he blatantly failed to understand the graph by claiming it shows real wages are "rising at fastest rate in 10 years" when it shows absolutely nothing of the sort*, he also tries to present evidence of 8 ruinous years of Tory wage collapse as "good news for working Britain".

With the Tories there's always the suspicion that they actually understand the truth that wage repression and austerity dogma are appalling economic policies for ordinary people and the economy as a whole, but that they continually spew demeaning economic idiot fodder about how great they are because they arrogantly assume the British public to be a bunch of economically illiterate pisswits.

This Tweet from Dominic Raab demonstrates something even more worrying.

Remember that this was the guy who was until recently entrusted by the Tory government to do the extraordinarily complex and important job of leading Britain's Brexit negotiations. Yet here's absolute proof that he can't even understand a very simple average weekly wage chart.

His ridiculously clueless Tweet is clear cut evidence that he can look at damning proof of the truly appalling consequences of his party's 8 year campaign of austerity and wage repression, and then conclude that his party are doing a fantastic job, and British workers should be thanking them!

The guy just simply doesn't have a clue what's been going on for the last 8 years.

He's so insulated by privilege, so unwilling to think outside the Tory echo chamber, and so economically illiterate that he clearly can't even read a simple chart.

Yet Theresa May and her Tory inner circle actually decided to give this unbelievably useless charlatan responsibility for heading by far the most complex and risky set of negotiations of the entire post-war era!

And even now millions of mainstream media rote-learning dupes still believe the Tories to be the party of economic competence!

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* = The fastest rise in the last 10 years was when the Tories eased wage repression just before the 2015 General Election in the hope that British workers would relieved to be able to breathe again that they'd totally forget whose boot had been standing on their necks for the previous four years.

Why are the Brits such willing doormats?

Just a year and a half after winning an unprecedented landslide victory the French President and his En Marche! "centrist" party have triggered a huge crisis with their policies of punishing workers and the poor, and pushing hard-right neoliberalism.

One of their first moves on assuming power was to lavish a huge tax cut on the wealthiest 1%, and ever since it's been one regressive and unpopular policy after another: Attacks on pensioners' incomes, anti-worker legislation, a move to flog off the French rail network to Macron's speculator mates, extremely unpopular education reforms, and the final straw was a series of fuel tax hikes designed to load the economic cost of combating climate change onto ordinary people, especially those who live in remote rural areas and rely on their cars for survival.

The result has been the rise of organic and leaderless gilets jaunes (yellow vests) mass demonstration all across France.

The mainstream media have obviously focused on examples of violence and vandalism in Paris in order to discredit the movement as much as possible, but the reality is that the vast majority of gilets jaunes protests are peaceful marches and roadblocks outside of Paris, which the overwhelming majority of French people support.

Within 18 months of Macron coming to power and imposing neoliberal policies and enforcing an unjustifiable upwards redistribution of wealth, the French public have had enough and they're fighting back.

Now just consider how different things are in Britain. It's over 8 years since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power (103 months). We've had ruinous austerity dogma, a massive unprecedented upwards redistribution of wealth, massive public service cuts, a ruinous "lost decade" of zero wage growth, draconian social security cuts, countless hard-right privatisation disasters (including the mass giveaway of state schools to unaccountable private profiteers), and shocking rises in child poverty, in-work poverty, and homelessness.

Not only has a gilets jaunes protest failed to materialise, but the British public have actually twice reelected the Tories who have been brutalising us like this!

The only hint of protest was the spectacular act of self-harm in allowing the very same hard-right Tories who trashed our standards of living (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Priti Patel ...) to convince us that immigrants and the EU were to blame for the horrific consequences of their own damned austerity policies and then voting for Brexit!

And when an opposition leader comes along to actually oppose the devastating hard-right fanaticism of the Tories (as opposed to pathetically imitating it like his predecessor) the political establishment, mainstream media hacks, and the "I'm alright Jack" chattering classes spew unprecedented amounts of hatred at him!*

Even now, after eight years of austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, ruinous privatisations, and malicious attacks on the social security safety net, and two and a half years of stewing in their own damned Brexit mess, they're soaring high in the polls (between the high-30s and low-40s).

To really put this contrast between the Brits and the French into context consider the changes in our standards of living over the last decade.

While Brits have experienced an outrageous 0.5% per year collapse in real wage growth, the French have experienced annual real wage growth of 0.7%.

For the last decade French workers have experienced growing real terms wages (at just about the average rate for Europe), while the British have been slumped at the bottom of the table with other European stragglers like Greece, Italy, and Spain.

But who are the ones engaging in a mass popular revolt against neoliberalism and the greed of the mega-rich?

The French!

So what is it about the Brits that makes them such willing doormats?

What makes them so comfortable with the erosion of their wages and living standards that they actually vote in favour of the culprits rather than fighting back?

I'm not actually sure I can answer the question.

Yes, it surely has something to do with Britain having the most right-wing media environment in Europe which repeatedly gives free passes to outrageous examples of Tory malice and incompetence, whilst holding opposition figures to way higher standards.

Yes, it probably has something to do with traditional British attitudes like "stiff upper lip" and "make do and mend".

And yes, the sickening deference to establishment figures with plummy accents that's still rife in Britain is surely a factor in the almost total impunity for the Tory toffs who have spent most of the last decade ideologically vandalising our country and vindictively abusing our most vulnerable citizens.

But are these factors enough to explain why the French stand up for themselves and the Brits just sit there and take dogs' abuse from millionaire Tory elitists for years, and then actually vote the callous abusive bastards back into power?

What do you think?

How do you explain it?

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Incidentally the Venn diagram of self-declared "centrists" who have been bitterly spewing hate at Jeremy Corbyn for the last three years, and those who greeted Macron's election in France as if it was the second coming of Christ would be more-or-less a perfect circle.

Theresa May just laughed in the face of the millions of workers her party has spent the last 8 years impoverishing

If you want to get to grips with the shocking levels of mainstream media bias in the UK just consider the reaction to Prime Minister's Questions on December 5th 2018.

Instead of criticising Theresa May for the absolutely shambolic state of her government, or the cynical and evasive scripted non-answers she responded with, or the usual cacophony of braying, jeering, and howling from the 300-odd millionaire elitists on the Tory benches, or the way she openly and contemptuously laughed in the face of the millions of workers her party has spent the last 8 years impoverishing, the BBC politics team and swathes of the mainstream media tried to create the absurd narrative that Theresa May somehow won the debate because Jeremy Corbyn asked the wrong questions!

The crux of their ridiculous narrative was that Jeremy Corbyn used his six questions to absolutely nail the Tory track record on poverty, collapsing wages, Universal Credit, and their grotesque publicity stunt the previous weekend of taking publicity photos in food banks (as if they're actually proud of their record of massively increasing poverty to the extent that huge numbers of people now rely on charitable food handouts to survive).

According the the bitter mainstream media hacks, Corbyn should have concentrated on Brexit minutae and the historic three defeats in a single day Theresa May's government had just suffered.

The absurdity of this warped anti-Corbyn narrative was beyond obvious.

It was always going to be the case that other MPs from all sides of the house (including Theresa May's own Tory backbenchers) would bring up Brexit, Theresa May's shambolic last-minute fudge of a deal, and the government's parliamentary defeats. Here's the SNP's Ian Blackford doing just that.

"Is it time that the Prime Minister took responsibility for concealing the facts on her Brexit deal from members in this House and the public?"

The SNP's Ian Blackford accuses Theresa May of "misleading" MPs. She denies this and the Speaker tells him off for using this word. pic.twitter.com/PJOtkbi5KN

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) December 5, 2018

Another element of the ridiculousness is that the three parliamentary defeats Theresa May suffered came as a direct consequence of Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party colleagues voting against the government.

These defeats didn't just materialise out of nowhere like the mainstream media hacks want to present it, the happened because Jeremy Corbyn worked with other opposition MPs and a small bunch of Tory rebels to inflict them.

Yet another element of the ridiculousness is that there are 5 days of parliamentary debate scheduled on Theresa May's Brexit shambles before the crunch vote on December 11th. PMQs was one of the very few political opportunities to talk about any other issue for the entire week, and the hacks all supposedly wanted Corbyn to waste it away on even more Brexit bickering!

By choosing not to gloat about Monday's parliamentary defeats and focus on poverty and collapsing living standards Corbyn opened a second front of attack, and a really important one too.

If Theresa May's Brexit deal is going to be stopped, triggering either a General Election or another EU referendum, it's now absolutely vital to make the crucial point that stagnant wages, soaring poverty, collapsing public services, crumbing infrastructure have nothing to do with immigration and the EU and everything to do with 8 ruinous years of Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, and under-investment.

If you're one of the millions of UK workers to have suffered a decade long real-terms decline in your wages, here's Theresa May and her millionaire Tory chums openly laughing at your plight!

They make us poorer then they actually laugh at what they've done. Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/n1M9e4f5J9

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) December 6, 2018

Then there's the fact that Corbyn's questions on poverty created an extraordinary clip that was so wildly inappropriate that it should have been widely broadcast and seen/heard by almost everyone. When Corbyn challenged Theresa May on Britain's "lost decade" of wage growth, she openly laughed about the collapsing living standards her party have inflicted.

• As a result of deliberate wage repression policies and ideologically driven cuts to in-work benefits millions of UK workers are far worse off in real terms than they were 10 years ago. 

• Tory Universal Credit has created massive spikes in poverty and unfairness everywhere it's been rolled out. And the curse of UC is spreading to places like Liverpool and North Kensington (where Grenfell Tower happened) just before Christmas.

• From 2010 onward Tories imposed the longest real-terms collapse in workers' wages since records began.

• Rates of in-work poverty are absolutely soaring, with 2/3 of children growing up in poverty actually living in working households.

• A damning United Nations report has slammed the Tories for replacing traditional British concern and compassion for vulnerable and suffering people with a "punitive, mean-spirited and callous approach".

• Exploitative and low-paid jobs like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment in the gig economy have spread like wildfire since 2010.

• The UK is still absolutely rock bottom of G20 wage growth league table.

And when Jeremy Corbyn challenged Theresa May on this absolutely outrageous track record, she actually sat there and laughed.

Instead of furiously attacking Jeremy Corbyn for asking vital questions about the poverty that is ruining the lives of millions, maybe mainstream media hacks could just have asked one single question about whether it was appropriate for Theresa May to sit there and laugh at the appalling wave of poverty the Tories have created?

But no. Holding Theresa May to account simply isn't part of their remit.

Even when her government is in chaos and she's openly laughing at the millions of people her party have deliberately impoverished, mainstream media hacks deliberately switch targets and aim their fury at Jeremy Corbyn for clinically highlighting a Tory track record of failure that extends way beyond recklessly gambling away the nation's future to nick a few thousand UKIP votes, then wasting two years cobbling together an absolute shambles of a Brexit plan.

For them it was an unforgivable mistake for Corbyn to have cornered Theresa May on poverty, and to even create the shocking situation where she openly and publicly laughed at the millions of workers her party have impoverished (a clip they would have shared with the nation if they had any intention of actually doing their jobs rather than cobbling together ludicrously tendentious anti-Corbyn outrage pieces).

What they apparently wanted to hear sequence of questions about the convoluted intricacies of Brexit with very limited appeal to people who live outside the Westminster bubble.

Think about it. If you're one of the millions who are struggling to put food on the table or heat your home, and can't even imagine how you're going to give your kids any kind of enjoyable Christmas, the last thing you want to hear is politicians quibbling about backstops, Brexit legal advice, a thing called a "Grieve amendment", etc.

The reason mainstream media hacks are presenting this as a terrible blunder from Corbyn is that he didn't say exactly what they wanted to hear. They're all living the high life on six figure salaries so why on earth would they ever give a shit about the tsunami of poverty and suffering the Tories have unleashed on millions of ordinary people, let alone when their blinkered Brexit obsession is reaching its absolute peak?

In fact they don't give a shit to such an extent that they still remain oblivious to the fact that it was this Tory policy of deliberately inflicting poverty and suffering on millions that generated the wave of public anger that actually lifted the Brexit vote just marginally above the 50% threshold.

This week they don't want to hear anything at all about anything that actually impacts the lives of millions, they want limited-appeal context-free Brexit bickering and nothing else, and they're going to scweam and scweam unless they get what they want.

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